Michael Cohen

Sheet 03 · Project register

Projects

Selected work: agronomy platforms, spatial data pipelines and map rendering.

MyFarmWeb

Technical Lead · Agri Technovation · 2022 —

  1. The client-facing agronomy platform: interactive maps, data exploration and reporting for farmers and agronomists.

    • Led a full rewrite of the client-facing frontend, improving performance, usability and platform adoption.
    • Developed regional-scale data exploration and export tools that process years of data quickly.
    • Moved static and spatial content delivery onto a CDN, improving caching efficiency and global latency.
    • Architected and delivered online service ordering, integrating with existing operational and scheduling workflows.
    • TypeScript
    • React
    • OpenLayers
    • WebGL
    • AWS
    myfarmweb.com
  2. Mobile

    Field applications for capturing survey data and reporting from the field.

    Capture — led the refactor, redesign and production deployment of a business-critical field app, reducing support burden while improving release confidence, user experience and maintainability.

    • Hand-coded advanced digitising features: performant survey gridding, manual digitising, and GPS-track-based digitising.

    ATVise — led development on a cross-team project compiling location-aware in-field text, voice and image recordings into context-enriched, editable reports for agronomists and agents to share.

    • React Native
    • TypeScript
  3. Data

    The data layer beneath the platform: pipelines, analytics and document generation.

    • Led the design and implementation of a centralised crop data platform, aligning and cleaning data across multiple legacy systems so that analytics and reporting could be trusted.
    • Built an analytics API with DuckDB and tRPC, aggregating large and disparate Parquet datasets while still adhering to MyFarmWeb’s data-access authorization model.
    • Redesigned the storage and processing of large spatial datasets, substantially reducing storage costs.
    • Designed and built a bespoke PDF map-book templating engine, dramatically cutting turnaround from sample collection to delivery.
    • TypeScript
    • DuckDB
    • tRPC
    • Parquet
    • Postgres
    • AWS
  4. Platform

    The internal tooling, packages and constraints the rest of the platform is built on.

    • Designed the internal packages, tooling and contribution constraints so that safety is enforced by the guard rails themselves rather than left to code review — opening the platform to LLM-assisted contributors.
    • Built CI/CD pipelines and automated end-to-end testing across multiple frontend applications.
    • Currently leading the migration off Firebase, which serves as the syncing layer for the Capture app.
    • TypeScript
    • TurboRepo
    • pnpm
    • Cloudflare Workers
    • GCP

Personal

  1. Easy-to-use thematic maps of South Africa.

    Each thematic map is a mini-system in its own right, with its own data pipeline, caching layer and scheduled jobs behind it.

    • Built entirely from publicly available datasets.
    • Nothing is proxied live except select API tiles; the rest is ingested on a schedule rather than fetched on demand.
    • Cached aggressively and selectively at every layer.

Design2Digital

Co-Founder & Full-Stack Developer · 2019 — 2022

  1. Client work

    A small software consultancy delivering production systems for clients across banking, agriculture and marketing.

    Co-founded a consultancy delivering production software for a range of clients, contributing to architecture, implementation and delivery while owning defined technical scope alongside engineers, designers and client stakeholders.